Hello again! This week has been a week of storms–both literal and figurative. The polar vortex produced some blustery winter days and a few snow showers this week. With temperatures dipping below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, we kept warm by brainstorming on hot social topics.
We started our week off with our first client meeting with Emily from Games for Change. We had numerous questions for her about the festival and she provided us with great insights. After our meeting with Emily, we decided to focus more on the social impact that we are trying to create with our game. Each of us chose a social issue that we thought was important, such as homelessness and unemployment, social and economic segregation, or sustainability, and did some preliminary research. The research we conducted ignited many interesting conversations amongst the team about the tough social issues in our modern world. We each presented the research of our social issues and we discussed them as a team, trying to get to the core of the issues. Having discussed these issues, we focused our brainstorming on what message we were trying to get across to the players, and then, with that in mind, what kind of game experience would best suit that message.
On Wednesday we had another team bonding event. We threw a mini surprise party for Lisa’s birthday and celebrated with cake! Then we watched a documentary recommended by Ralph and Brenda called The Gleaners and I. Though this documentary was not directly related to the social issues that we had been researching, it did inspire some new thoughts and ways of thinking about our own social issues.
Our producers have been very busy this week. They created a spreadsheet with everyone’s roles and responsibilities clearly laid out and created an accountability system to ensure that we all stay on track. After our client meeting, they began looking at the whole semester and laying out our schedule of production. Our client recommended that we come and visit New York City to get a tour of the space where the festival will be held. So our producers have also been working hard to plan a team trip with our advisors in the next two weeks.
We ended our week with an early morning meeting with Ralph and Brenda and solidified a few ideas for our project. Next week we will pitch these ideas to Emily at Games for Change and narrow down our focus even more. We plan to conduct deeper research into our short list of social issues as well as begin to design some of the gameplay elements.